Thursday, April 9, 2015

NYU Stern Studies Ties Online Word of Mouth to Box Office Success

A graduate of the NYU Stern School of Business MBA program, Beth Hirschhorn has led a distinguished career as a marketing specialist, holding senior positions with Fortune 500 companies such as MetLife and J.P. Morgan Chase. Beth Hirschhorn is currently the chief marketing officer of Kaplan, Inc. In addition, she serves as an adjunct professor of marketing at her alma mater.

The NYU Stern School of Business Marketing program is recognized as one of the leading research programs in the nation and one of the most influential voices in business media. Recently, NYU professors C. Samuel Craig and William Greene released an in-depth study of box office success. The professors, along with coauthor Anthony Versaci of AIG, studied 62 major films over a six-month period and compared opening-weekend revenue with online activity on various film-specific websites.

Their findings showed that the amount of word-of-mouth press three weeks prior to opening directly correlated with revenue, providing marketers with the opportunity to utilize big data and adjust pre-release marketing strategies accordingly. Other factors that were found to impact online buzz included the size of the budget, whether or not the film was a sequel, and the film's genre. The full study appears in the March 2015 issue of the Journal of Advertising Research.

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About Me

Beth Hirschhorn is the chief marketing officer of educational
provider, Kaplan, Inc. In this position, Beth Hirschhorn is responsible
for Kaplan's worldwide digital marketing and branding efforts, as well
as leading Kaplan's customer experience efforts.

Prior to her
appointment to Kaplan, Hirschhorn led a number of successful marketing
initiatives for MetLife's insurance and benefits programs. As an
executive officer, she dramatically increased consideration of the
company's products and services and created new avenues for increasing
MetLife's reputation via new media. She also led a national advertising
campaign called I Can Do This, which appeared on television and social
media.

Earlier, Beth Hirschhorn marketed “personal safety net”
plans in response to the changing financial positions of Americans. For
the initiative, she developed a new multimedia campaign that catapulted
brand preference measures by 11 points in less than a year,
outperforming competitors.

Hirschhorn also has experience in
academia. As an adjunct professor, she teaches marketing of services at
New York University's Stern School of Business and the Tobin College of
Business at St. John's University.